The wheels start to lift and I turn the phone to airplane mode, hitting play on the music. As we ascend above the clouds, the noise from the day-to-day slips away and my thoughts drift to the bird’s eye view of my life.

In the digital desert of the sky, Abba and I start talking. Or really, He’s listening and I’m exhaling words. And as I start to unravel the past few days and do a temperature check on my soul, I find this truth again:

When I slow my breathing and take each thought captive, the mountains towering down crumble into grains of sand running through His hands. The fever pitch frenzy building in my soul these past few weeks is slowly replaced with soothing peace.

What our souls thirst for isn’t more news, more noise, more to do lists to run down and check off. Those just leave us parched and gasping in a dry and weary land. No, our souls depend on the daily getting away, the life-support found in the hard stop.

He’s calling us to come into the quiet space, to sit in the shade of the tree and be still. To lift our eyes from the flurry in front of us and know that He who who flung the stars and spins the clouds is holding us. And He is for us. And He is bigger than our current circumstances.

Maybe you’re like me and right now five minutes of quiet feels like a first-class luxury. Like we’re just waiting for an upgrade, a move along to some future time when we can sit in the endless moments with nothing and no one calling our name. But until then, we’re doomed to running ragged on the hamster wheel of every day.

But I need the quiet now. The slowing of the minutes now, so my soul can catch up, drinking long and cool gulps. I can’t wait until some future date because it’s Today that is bearing down with the weight of raising souls and giving love. I don’t want to miss today because I’m waiting for some future that may never arrive.

Worse, I don’t want to waste today.

Because don’t we have five minutes to scroll through pictures and read maddening headlines? So maybe time isn’t really the issue. It’s how I’m spending it. The minutes in the day that we will never get back. Perhaps a little less of the Feed and a little more feeding at the Source and the balance would return. The frenzy would quiet and the heart would shift back into the right place.

The first month of the new year is done and people are failing their diets and their gym dreams. But there’s nothing special about January 1. And why can’t February 1 (Or February 4) be the start of something fresh, the start of a Whole 30 for the soul?

What if you and me and a whole tribe of people running hard took a thirty-day challenge to stop and detox the soul? Could we give five minutes here and there to quiet the galloping thoughts, put down our phones and shift our eyes from what is in front to Who is above?

A coming together to intentionally slow down, ponder, and refuse as a body to be ruled by the immediate. We will buck the trend of pride in the busy and will take a month to own our minutes. 

Could you take five minutes a day? Three times a day? Five minutes to sit and be still and take a temperature read of the heart.

Can you afford not to?

Follow along and be part of the #3x5challenge. Our souls are dying for the hard stop in the busy days. And maybe these next thirty days you’ll find the slowed down, peaceful breathing you’ve been craving.

Next post we’ll unpack the #3x5challenge and jump in together. 

P.S. You’ll only get about an email a week on this. Not thirty days of emails. Ain’t nobody got time for that.